T-Mobile Simply Lies When Pressed About 9,000 Lost Jobs In Wake Of Sprint Merger
Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at critics of the deal who predicted job losses, the former potty-mouth CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be job positive from day one" and every day thereafter.
Yeah, about that.
Geekwire did a proper retrospective on the deal's impact last week (something the press usually can't be bothered to do), and found that T-Mobile now employs 9,000 fewer employees than it did before the deal. And while that's not quite as bad as the 15,000-30,000 jobs union leaders predicted (although layoffs will likely continue), it's still... not great.
Especially given the lengths T-Mobile went to to insist layoffs would never happen, and the hostility the company expressed against deal critics who predicted otherwise.
When Geekwire's Todd Bishop pressed the company on its failed promise to create jobs... T-Mobile officials simply lied, falsely claiming they'd accomplished their goal:
We've upheld our jobs commitment. Before we merged with Sprint we said we'd have more employees as a combined company than the two standalone companies would have had on their own without the merger - and we have done just that."
This is patently false and disproven by the company's own publicly-available earnings data and employee numbers, which indicate it's clearly about 9k employees lighter.
As Geekwire notes, they gave the company another shot to answer the question, and T-Mobile simply doubled down, again falsely claiming they'd fulfilled their promises of job creation. T-Mobile can lie here because it knows federal U.S. telecom regulators are gridlocked by telecom industry lobbying, and generally too feckless to do anything about it even when they aren't.
This is, of course, par for the course for U.S. megamergers, especially in the highly consolidated telecom space. Companies make all manner of empty promises to regulators pre-merger, knowing full well they have zero intention of following through. Thanks to federal regulatory capture and corruption, the penalty for these kinds of empty promises is usually nonexistent.
Recall, the Trump FCC approved the T-Mobile Sprint merger without even reading data on the deal's impact. Trump DOJ antitrust enforcer" Makan Delrahim used his personal email and phone to work closely with T-Mobile to ensure regulatory approval, resulting in a plan to try and make a new competitor out of Dish Network that's looking increasingly doomed.
This is all extremely typical for a country that talks a lot about job creation" and antitrust reform," yet routinely rubber stamps mergers and consolidation without the slightest fuck given about the employee and consumer-facing repercussions. None of the think tankers, hired economists, Senators or regulators responsible for the impact of consolidation in telecom are ever held even remotely accountable, and the band plays on to obvious effect.